It is time for Americans to disregard the platitudes that have been the rationale for the shutdowns destroying most institutions, including small businesses, schools and churches. By now everyone is wearily familiar with the supposedly spotless motives of those who are fast forwarding their “New Normal” and “Great Reset.”

As the toxic effects of lockdowns and regulatory minutiae have become apparent, Americans realize neither their individual nor their collective good has been furthered. Instead, they have found nearly all their social ties and institutions either short circuited or transformed beyond belief.

How are radicals, including the high priests of Covidism, attempting to usher in a new reality? While America presently is not under the sort of totalitarianism characterizing the USSR, the tactics employed by the Left resemble the ways the Soviet Union ushered millions of its citizens into the new reality of the gulag.

First, as Solzhenitsyn detailed in his expose The Gulag Archipelago, the accused was deprived of identity.  He or she went from belonging to not belonging; from unique individual to featureless object. The transference to a new identity within a new order was accomplished by stripping the unfortunate of everything that gave a sense of location, be it family, community, citizenship or faith. 

For months, nearly everything that has given Americans a sense of location, place and community has been radically changed or taken away entirely, including the ways Americans traditionally have worshipped their God. 

As was the case in the USSR, powerful entities such as the media, academia and radicals in seats of power, visible and invisible, are openly hostile to the majority of American citizens. Covid-19 regulations have psychologically strip searched every citizen.  Nearly the entire populace has been under the equivalent of house arrest.

Yochai Ataria noted in his essay, “Becoming Nonhuman: The Case Study of the Gulag: 

“It thus seems that one of the major goals… was to ensure the prisoners understood that they were not longer ordinary human beings. Indeed, they were not interrogated as people but rather as objects on an assembly line... The overall objective was to strip the prisoner of all aspects of humanity. This was a major junction in transforming the prisoner into an object.”

How was the dehumanization of the individual achieved?

First, solitary confinement was employed as a “low-cost and useful way of breaking the prisoner…Here in the Lubyanka, you are no longer a person. There are people around you. Lead you down the corridor, photograph you, undress you, search you mechanically. Everything is done completely impersonally. You look for a human glance… but you don’t find it…    They don’t see you as a human being! You have become an object.

Isn’t it apparent that millions of Americans are enduring the equivalent of solitary confinement as the lockdowns continue indefinitely?  Isn’t it clear the universal masking of the human face and the forced distancing from one another has distorted all relationships? How many millions search for a human glance from individuals rendered featureless?  How distorting is the recommendation that couples making love wear masks?

Second, Soviet prisoners were prevented from any kind of communication from others because communication would “bring about the collapse of the entire mechanism by preserving some element of humanity.”

By now, most Americans are well aware of the efforts to block communication countering the alternate reality of the “Great Reset.” Mainstream Media, Facebook, Twitter and other communication networks are working overtime to censor speech contrary to the approved narrative.  

Even the president of our country is being censored. He routinely has had corrections added to his Twitter feed; his speeches are not carried by MSM, and his attorneys’ attempts to get the facts out about the stench of election fraud are sidelined or ignored. As for Joe Average Citizen, social media giants such as Facebook pointedly block communication that is out of line with their “standards,” while so-called “fact checkers,” aka brainwashers, post relentless reminders about the newly favored “realities” of the Great Reset.

For those who have wondered about the role of trans ideology in resetting reality, wonder no more.  It also is a tool to dehumanize every person, blurring as it does the physical reality that identifies every human being as male or female. As a recent article in Spike magazine noted of the recent decision of Ellen Page, who has declared herself to be a man:

“Do we matter? It seems not. The elitism of identitarianism is exposed in its commitment to overriding what society at large understands and believes, all those facts and customs we adhere to, and in its demand that we lie – that we say Caitlyn Jenner won a gold medal and that Ellen Page is male… The cult of transgenderism isn’t liberation. All it does is allow individuals to ‘liberate’ themselves from reality while heaping pressure on the rest of us to deny the truth, to silence our own knowledge, to lie to ourselves and to others. That is the opposite of freedom. Sorry, Ellen.”

Another stage in the project of dehumanization involves ensuring no one except an elite has a meaningful voice in any institution.  That is why the current electoral fraud is so significant a tool for dehumanizing Americans. A primary way of being American individual is to have a meaningful vote, to know your voice counts.  Electoral fraud is a laryngectomy of the American people, many of whom were already rendered voiceless during their time in the halls of academia.

Disenfranchisement also is a way of establishing a new order run by elites, as ordinary men and women are left without a national identity. A hostile takeover designed to create anonymity by erasure of identity ensures the vitiation American’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Last, but perhaps most significant, the Great Reset means the silencing of the religious who adhere to the transcendent realities of natural law and the Creator.  They resist the Great Reset because it is built on Great Lies that deny the natural order given us in order to propagate what is clearly untruth.

No one who is sentient can have missed the over hostility toward Christianity and traditional Judaism by the radicals now controlling the Democratic party. The deeply religious are automatically targets of the Left, just as they were during the Soviet regime, and just as they are in the People’s Republic of China.

What was and is the ultimate goal of what is now the corpse of the USSR entity and it’s still living cousin the People’s Republic of China, as well as the radical Left in America?  

Ataria explains the process behind forced conversion:

“Our sense of belonging to the world is so obvious that in our daily life we simply tend to forget we are part of this world. We belong not merely to the world around us but also to the same human race. It seems that power becomes an absolute power when it can remove humans from their familiar world and transform them into nonhumans -- placing a person outside the human race. This process transforms a living-subject, engaged with the world, into a dead object which is detached from the world -- it is a shift from belonging to nonbelonging… Under these conditions, nothing of the so-called ‘old-self’ remains. Indeed, just like Orwell’s hero Winston Smith… the prisoner reboots and is reborn as an object belonging to the Gulag.”

How can we counter the trend that dehumanizes the peoples of the world?

For Christians as well as for devout Jews, the answer is found in the concept of human beings as created in the image of God, the Creator of all that is. Every individual life bears the imago dei and is invaluable in the sight of God.  So we regard our fellow human being as like ourselves, as the Great Commandment transcending any laws of a Great Reset states.  Life has intrinsic meaning because of Who authors, preserves and redeems humans. 

In that Great Commandment lies the rationale for resistance to a tyrannous and dehumanizing Great Reset that would be essentially mass conversion through force.  

Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her the prize for excellence in systematic theology.  Her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines. She has been a regular contributor to American Thinker.  She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com